Other
Cha McCoy
James Beard Award winner
- Discipline
- Other
i. Biography
Cha McCoy’s route runs from a first awakening of taste in Italy to ownership of The Communion wine boutique, with a Certified Sommelier’s discipline and a host’s sense of invitation. Along the way, her work has narrowed into a clear calling: pairing wine with foods from Africa and beyond, while making the bottle feel less guarded and more communal.
Early Years
Italy was the place where the palate began to sharpen. McCoy has put that origin plainly: "Italy was the first place where I was developing a palate for wine, and able to notice the differences between varietals." The sentence is important because it locates her wine education not in abstraction, but in attention — the moment when grapes stopped being a category and started becoming distinct voices. That early act of noticing still reads through her work. A varietal difference, once perceived, becomes a doorway: to food, to memory, to geography, to the person at the table who may not have been made to feel fluent in wine before. Her credential as a Certified Sommelier gives that instinct a formal spine, but the direction of the work is broader than certification alone.
Making a Name
The most specific through-line in McCoy’s work is pairing wine with foods from Africa and beyond. It is a specialty with a cultural charge: not treating wine as a closed European language, but as something that can meet diasporic foodways, regional cuisines, and everyday pleasure with equal seriousness. That approach also shaped her writing. On the process of creating *Wine Pairing for the People*, she has said, "Writing Wine Pairing for the People was a blessing in disguise. It was an opportunity to work fully in my zone of genius, curating and creating gastronomic worlds chapter by chapter." The phrase “chapter by chapter” fits the way her work moves — not as a single lecture, but as a sequence of invitations, each pairing building its own atmosphere. The work did not stay on the page alone. Reflecting on the shift from event production into another format, she said, "While it was different from my event production work, it reminded me that the best concepts only come to life through collaboration and can translate to different mediums." That line gives a useful key to her method: wine as a medium that can travel between a room, a meal, a book, and a retail space without losing the social energy that gives it force.
The Present
Today, McCoy is the owner of The Communion wine boutique. The name suits the philosophy: make wine more accessible and inclusive for her community. In practice, that means the authority of a sommelier is not used to intimidate, but to open a conversation. Her work now gathers the earlier strands into one place. The palate developed in Italy, the Certified Sommelier credential, the focus on pairing across Africa and beyond, and the belief in collaboration all point toward a version of wine culture built around welcome rather than gatekeeping. The result is not wine stripped of complexity; it is complexity offered with a hand extended.
Profile updated July 2026
FAQ
Asked of Cha
What roles has Cha McCoy held?
She is a Certified Sommelier, has worked in event production, wrote *Wine Pairing for the People*, and owns The Communion wine boutique.
What is Cha McCoy doing now?
McCoy owns The Communion wine boutique and focuses on making wine more accessible and inclusive for her community.
